As if out of a scene from Steven Spielberg’s “The Poltergeist,” investigators descended upon the Victorian Mansion just off Avenue A in Bayonne on Sept. 28, determined to find evidence about the rumored ghost there.
The nine-person crew paid a visit to the Robbins Reef Yacht Club carrying a variety of equipment that the investigators hoped would capture the sound or sight of the ghost that many people over the years claim still haunts the century old building.
Bayonne has a few rumored ghosts, though none are more well known than the ghost at Robbins Reef.
Since this is a private club, the researchers had to get permission from the membership, although many of the long time members of the club have wondered about the ghost, hearing noises, even at times, seeing odd happenings.
The building dates back to early Bayonne when the city served as a kind of resort for New York City’s social elite.
The mansion, sometimes known as the Schuyler Mansion was a private estate before the yacht club purchased the building when relocating from the east side of Bayonne.
Tales had already circulated locally about the broken-hearted son who hung himself in the upstairs bedroom – leaping out the window with a rope around his neck at some point prior to the purchase.
Yacht club patrons and their guests sometimes reported odd happenings such as feeling cold spots in certain places, particularly in the bedroom area, and that sometimes things would fly off the shelves at the bar, and if replaced, would fly off the shelf again. On occasion, members reported catching glimpses of what might be ghosts.
Some people are scared to be there. Most members of the club avoid the closed off section where the ghost is supposed to haunt. One woman said late a night she hears noises in that part of the building.
For local ghost busters, determined to find evidence of ghosts throughout the New Jersey area, Robbins Reef was too good an opportunity to pass up.
So two of the more prominent groups Real Hauntings and Paranormal Visions got together to investigate.
Desiree Wojtanowski, from Paranormal Visions based in Brick, said the investigation was prompted by Allison Lynch, of Bayonne, who is a member of Real Hauntings. “We linked up with them,” Wojtanowski said. “Real Hauntings founded the Bayonne investigation.”
The team was made up of nine investigators that brought in a variety of equipment in the hopes of detecting the illusive spirit.
While many groups investigate hauntings using a variety of instruments that include meters and gauges, the most effective pieces of equipment tend to be tape recorders and thermal imaging cameras.
“Gauges and meters only measure what our current science can understand,” said Craig McManus, one of New Jersey’s well-known ghost hunters, and the author of two books on ghost hunting in Cape May. “EMF/trifield meters have rarely worked for me. Only once in a haunted house did a meter start to move by itself without being touched or moved around.”
McManus, who has uncovered many of the better-known ghosts in Cape May’s Victorian era structures, says he apparently has a gift for sensing natural energy ghosts exude.
An investigation can take a day or weeks to conduct. In the case of Robbins Reef, investigators spent the day probing those areas where the ghost was suspected.
Wojtanowski, who was part of the team, had become involved with such investigations because she had always had a connection to the other world, going back to early childhood when at 18 months old her parents caught her talking to her grandfather – a grandfather who had passed away eight months prior to her birth.
“We got there about 7 a.m. and started about 8:30 a.m., and completed the investigation about 2:30 a.m. the next morning,” Wojtanowski said.
McManus, who has worked with similar groups throughout the state, said investigators search out what are called “hot spots” of energy, and frequently use intuition to set up equipment with hopes of catching images or sounds.
“We set up our equipment which included an infrared video, a digital camera, voice recorder,” Wojtanowski said. “We spent several hours doing electronic work after we questioned people there about the place and what they saw. When we analyze the data, we hope to hear voices on the tape recordings that are not ours.”
McManus said most investigations involve “a walk through” the haunted areas.
“If there are too many (living) people present, I will have difficulty sensing any ghosts,” he said. “I usually like to spend the night doing an investigation. It is quieter later in the evening and the ghosts are more active because the living are usually asleep and they have room to “breathe.”
Wojtanowski said the crew found evidence of a ghostly presence just from the photographs.
“We have some orbs on the digital pictures, although we have to be certain that we have captured are orbs and not the product of dust,” she said. “True orbs have life to them. They emit light rather than merely reflections from flashes.”
Ghosts, Wojtanowski added, rarely act the way you expect.
“They also never act when you want them to act, so they are hard to capture,” she said.
McManus, who has successfully identified many ghosts in Cape May and other parts of New Jersey, says he tries to communicate with the ghost when he finds it.
“Ghosts communicate by hearing our thoughts,” he said. “They have no ears or voice boxes so every communication is in the form of energy. Some ghosts want to talk to me, others do not and will move away. It is very difficult to get a ghost to actually have a mental conversation with a living person.”
While the findings by Paranormal and Real Hauntings seem to indicate that Robbins Reef really is haunted, no one can yet say whether the ghost of the boy long ago is a friendly or nasty ghost.
“Ghosts have the same personality they had in life,” McManus said. “A hostile person will usually be a hostile ghost. However, many hauntings that seem to be hostile are really just mischievous ghosts and those ghosts are usually those of children. Boys will be boys and ghosts of boys will act like boys. If a presence is truly hostile, there are people that deal with such energies. I do not. I will leave the premise quickly if I sense something malevolent. 99.9 percent of hauntings are benevolent.
McManus suggests talking things out with the ghost.
“I suggest trying to talk to the ghost first, talking and thinking the information and letting the ghost know it is scaring you and that it must stop will sometimes help to ease the tension,” McManus said. “Most ghosts just want to be left alone.”
For anyone interested in finding more information about Paranormal or seeing more photographs from the Robbins Reef haunting, you can go to the Web site: http://www.paranormalvisions.com
To find out more about the books of Craig McManus, you can call his office at (201) 493-0772 or visit him online at www.channelcraig.com. His books are available in Cape May and at Barnes & Nobles outlets and on Amazon.com.